I hate people who treat them like some toys and fantasize about them. That makes me think they are in some sort of death cult. That they found socially acceptable way to love violence.
I would still get one for safety but it is a tool made for specifically one thing. To pierce the skin and rip through the inner organs of a person.
They can serve a good purpose but they are fundamentally grim tools of pain and suffering. They shouldn’t be celebrated and glorified in their own right, that is sick. They can be used to preserve something precious but at a price to pay.
I’m being pedantic, but many are designed to take the lives of animals rather than people. Absurdly heavy precision .22 cal target rifles are clearly only for sport.
A few are designed to launch flares high into the air for communication. A very small number are designed to trigger avalanches under controlled conditions.
AVALANCHE GUNS??
Humans are animals…
That’s like saying all cars are meant for the racetrack or all knives are made for spreading butter.
I own several guns, and none of them are so I can kill. My over/under shotgun is designed for skeet shooting. My 22 pistol is for plinking. My precision rifle weighs 30 pounds with its optic, so is incredibly impractical as a weapon.
that’s not the only purpose dude. you can use a machine gun to shoot a circle around a door knob to unlock any door.
I have worked in Accident & Emergency in England and in an ER in America. Guns are a curse.
You all need to see the deserted dead body of a 15 year old laying on the table after an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt. A baby who has been shot through, or the crowds of relatives helplessly sobbing in the streets outside the emergency room.
Every gun owner thinks they are a responsible gun owner until they arent. Its simply not possible to be 100% safe 100% of the time. That’s not a thing that humans do.
And no. There are nowhere near as many knife deaths in England.
I never saw a fatal stabbing in the UK, but I’ve seen many in America. The numbers are insignificant when compared to gun accidents and murders.
All “tools” that kill this many people should absolutely be regulated.
Americans never shut up about freedom, but don’t pay attention to the freedom taken away simply by the threat that anyone around you could be carrying a gun. You’re all just used to it being your way. It’s so nice not to have to consider the possibility. The american way is like spending your lives with the sword of Damocles dangling over your heads. That’s your freedom.
Every gun owner thinks they are a responsible gun owner until they arent. Its simply not possible to be 100% safe 100% of the time. That’s not a thing that humans do.
yep. and that’s the small percentage that gives a flying fuck about safe firearms use and security, apparently. Around 380,000 stolen guns every year.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/09/guns-stolen-cars-everytown-report
https://jalopnik.com/youve-got-to-stop-keeping-your-gun-in-your-car-1850929717
https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-thefts-from-cars-the-largest-source-of-stolen-guns-2/
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/nfcta-volume-ii-part-v-firearm-thefts/download
https://jalopnik.com/a-gun-is-stolen-from-a-car-every-9-minutes-in-america-1851472717
https://everytownresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2019/03/Stolen-Guns-FACT-SHEET-030619B.pdf
Every gun owner thinks they are a responsible gun owner until they arent. Its simply not possible to be 100% safe 100% of the time.
Thank you. I have said something similar multiple times myself, but I have no medical experience to back that up.
Edit: It reminds me of fellow parents who declare, “I’m a responsible parent.” No, you try to be a responsible parent. You’ve fucked up on that front before. We all have. Hopefully you didn’t fuck up too badly. If you are a parent and you think you’ve never once behaved in any way with your child that might have been considered irresponsible, you are a narcissist. And wrong.
Oh look, inner city bullshit stereotypes by some moron blathering about England in the later half. Fuck you and everything about you.
Haha. What a well composed rebuttal
you a liar too. worked in the ER and never saw a fatal stabbing. You work there a week?
Really dude?
Yes really,
I agree with you. You hate them, that’s reasonable. They represent humanity’s failure at cooperation.
You’re also totally justified to hate those who fetishize them.
You are wrong about them being designed only to kill, though. The point of them is to wield deadly force, and they are designed to send a high-speed projectile in order to achieve that goal, of deadly force. It’s alittle semantic, but an important distinction imo, because the point of wielding deadly force is to make opponents compliant even if you never use it.
Swords, spears, bows, atlatls, and pretty much every weapon of war was the exact same way. A key difference between them and the firearm, though, is that the firearm takes little to no training in comparison to the others, which take considerable amounts more.
Everything else, we’re in agreement about. I think you hold a hate for violence as well, based on your stance. That is also healthy, but I hope you also see violence for the liberating force that it is, able to protect those that are targeted.
We are on the brink of having the US become a full-blown fascist state - as opposed to the fascistic nation it’s always been. Should that happen, I fear the only way back is through violence, and I’d much prefer having a rifle in hand to the alternative of charging down gunfire armed with a lesser weapon, as the Egyptians had to during their revolution in 2011.
You are wrong about them being designed only to kill, though. The point of them is to wield deadly force,
…?
uh dude. you’re creating complexity where the simpler answer is obvious. if their point is to wield a force that’s deadly, it’s point is to be able to kill at a trigger pull.
you’re correct elsewhere that firearms reduce the training necessary to be a lethal threat at short notice, but imho that’s academic. An amateur with a knife can still be deadly, same with a spear. Atlatls are a different story; they require actual training. this is all over the place and loses the thread that firearms are distinctly weapons to maim and kill.
Love it. You can never post anything bad about guns on Reddit’s unpopular opinion section. And I agree, it’s to murder other humans. The 2nd amendment’s present interpretation is an amazing example why I have such low respect for constitutional lawyers: The well-regulated militia part is in the same sentence to specifically set the context in which the right to bear arms is protected and people getting away without taking the militia part into consideration is total bullshit.
Also, the 2nd amendment does not absolve irresponsible gun owners for the consequences of their gun ownership. Since Americans lose 350K guns annually (!!!) and provide most of the Mexican cartels’ firearms, there’s a lot of bad gun ownership that people should be punished for. Generally speaking, you’ll be the last to know about the gun ownership of people who actually store them responsibly.
You can’t actually be that dumb, the militia part was state level.
You can’t actually be that dumb, the militia part was state level.
It’s hard to debate such well-regulated arguments.:) Also, we found the redditor!
No, you found a person can read, ain’t even american.
No, you found a person can read, ain’t even american.
Certainly not one who proofreads.😂 I’m very eager to hear your explanation on the state level stuff, but I suspect you’re not here for the intellectual discourse:D
The IQ of one who judges by accent/dialect is usually quite low
You can’t actually be that dumb, the militia part was state level.
This you?:D
Is this community just popular opinions? Every comment agrees with OP.
There are too many responses here to reply to all of them individually so I’m just going to post some quotes here, more in response to other comments than the OP, but perhaps also a perspective to consider for OP as well.
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”
- George Orwell
And the shockingly only increasingly relevant full quote from one of the founders of the Black Panthers party:
“Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it’s off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves.”
- Huey Newton
I’d really ask more people to consider their position of privilege, to be less afraid of state sanctioned or enabled violence of all forms than some crazy neighbor with guns who was likely failed many times by that very state to have come to this point. Please just consider the counterpoint, that armed minorities are harder to oppress, and that far, far more people have been killed by state sanctioned and enabled violence, than by access to firearms by “the common people”.
I’m not telling anyone that they’re wrong, I’m just asking that you really internalize and consider this perspective. Thank you for reading and thinking.
It’s amazing how the media and propaganda has made enemies of our neighbors and stoked those fears until the populace thinks they need to always be vigilant of some perceived slight or danger.
They have kept us blind of those who have organized a societally approved threat. Law and order is not kept through threats of violence by the state. It is built through the community and rising up all those around us.
A rising tide lifts the boat, we all benefit when those around us are doing better.
If that’s the reason why Yanks like to arm themselves to the teeth, you’d think that at least one of them might actually do something about what’s happening to their country now.
Instead it just looks like they enjoy the power fantasy, imagining that they might get to legally murder someone who trespasses on their property one day.
I don’t know how you read what I wrote and took from it “I don’t think American culture has a problem involving guns”
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It’s a tool whose primary purpose is to kill
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Hunting is also killing. Don’t get me wrong, among the various ways of killing animals for food it is probably the most ethical. But still.
I say this because I’ve always resented the particularly odious false equivalence that cars also kill people so if we ban machine guns wE sHoULd aLsO bAN cARs.
No. One is purpose built to maim and kill people and the other most certainly isn’t.
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everything made my human minds is a tool.
What sort of tool is the Mona Lisa?
Gotta resist fascism somehow
You already had a coup and nobody is using guns to stop it.
I got an assload of harsh language that work?
How’s that working out for ya?
Luigi did more with three bullets than peaceful protest has accomplished in the last 25 years.
I’m curious what you think he’s accomplished. Cause the dead guy was replaced immediately with someone just as evil, and the anesthesia coverage thing you all love to claim was already in the works weeks before Luigi.
Nothing changed. It’s still business as usual for health insurance companies.
He wiped out 6 months of UHC stock price gains overnight and caused Cigna to commit to expanding their accountability, transparency and customer service departments and tie executive compensation to customer satisfaction metrics.
What did peaceful protest get you in the last two decades? Romneycare is all I can think of and the insurance mandate was a huge step backwards that wipes out any benefit that might be seen from the mandatory coverage for pre-existing conditions.
Just a few nits: he did cause the price to drop, but it’s not as significant as you make it sound. Their price had just spiked up to all time highs, and it dropped down to where it was before the spike.
The drop wasn’t even out of proportion with the fluctuations the price normally has seen over recent history.
Finally, stock price falling doesn’t actually get us anything. If anything, it’ll make them more aggressive about costs to bolster the earnings sheet to get the price back up.
I’d focus on the “spotlight on the dark situation” side of things, and how making the insurance companies aware that we’re mad enough to kill them and laugh at their death means we might actually be getting close to mad enough to institute a program that saves us money and pays for more treatment of higher quality for more people.
Cigna was already doing all of that.
Source: used to work there, have friends that still do, including execs
You saw damn near the whole country coming out in support of Luigi and gaining more class consciousness seemingly overnight. Imagine that power of mass organization being used to, say, organize a general strike.
Even most Trump supporters voted for him because they were/are going through economic struggle, and Trump (and decades of right wing propaganda) was able to successfully brainwash these people into pointing the finger at immigrants and trans people instead of the obvious culprit (billionaires).
It’s not too difficult to help someone come to the conclusion that billionaores are the problem if they’re struggling financially.
Obviously, you have the Trump supporters who specifically support him (and continue to) because he’s a fascist leader who has Nazi idiology that they agree with, but I think that’s a (very, very vocal) minority of his supporters.
Hopefully, he encouraged other people to carry on his work.
Oh, by all means, give that a try, see how it goes. I’d say “and then report back”, but… you know, that wouldn’t be much use.
I have a feeling that the “punch the nazies” people who are the loudest online are the ones nowhere to be found when the shit actually hits the fan. The ones who actually would aren’t talking about it on social media and especially not on Lemmy.
“Bum bum pif paf” is a childish, almost cartoonish way of resistance. If you’re a serious person, you understand that while certain actions may sometimes be necessary, celebrating or eagerly anticipating them is disturbing. Additionally, such actions are rarely the real solution to a problem.
People who fantasize about violence write things like this not because they want to solve anything, but because they’re looking for an excuse to act out and release their anger.
Wow you really project a lot onto one short sentence. Ignoring any reference to historical resistance in order to feel superior about your views.
Gun defenders are always like this. Historical this, historical that but in truth they just want a license to kill.
I know that on Lemmy there are many bloodthirsty motherfuckers who just go to sleep imagining saving the world with a smoking 92fs. Not because it would help anyone but because they are kinky like that
Well that’s an awfully specific gun reference for someone who hates them so much.
word salad
FWIW I don’t believe you are wrong. Most people advocating for/ fantasizing about violence have never experienced prolonged conflict. Sure, you’re hot shit the first day or two but even if the fighting stays a few hundred miles away, it becomes exhausting and sickening. Especially if you have a family to worry about.
All of this said, it is not the only reason to own a gun. Many own weapons for the purpose of self defense — whether that be from other people or wildlife. We own guns because we are afraid — justifiably or not.
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This seems like a very urban viewpoint. There are still places in the world and in the US in particular where a firearm is tool for safety that has nothing to do with other humans.
Not to mention hunting is a thing.
Bows and crossbows exist.
But are comparatively wildly inefficient and cause more pain before the death of the animal.
Not disagreeing with that, but the topic at hand were alternatives to hunting with guns. I think bolt action rifles should be the only allowable gun for hunting.
Yer not gonna get a tasty bird with a bolt-action rifle or a bow!
You’ve obviously never had a grouse, or are just a bad shot. lol
I hit my bag limit with a 22lr all the time.
Okay but I’m talking about sky birds.
Just out of curiosity, would you please point out your approximate location on this map of invasive feral swine distribution:
My thumb isn’t big enough to point it all out.
I will do the people reading along the favor of not posting images from an article titled “Penetrating Anorectal Injury Caused by a Wild Boar Attack: A Case Report”.
Suffice it to say, hunters in the marked areas have a distinct need for semi automatic rifles.
That seems like a very I have nothing to fear from other people viewpoint. Lots of places in urban areas where a firearm is a tool for safety that has everything to do with other humans.
No, it’s just that rural people expect their opinions to count more, as though their lifestyles are more authentic or honorable.
And where exactly is it that a firearm is necessary to protect from wildlife? Kodiak Island?
As far as the safety argument goes, let’s examine Police. The number one cause of “in the line of duty” fatalities is auto accidents, the second is heart disease, with COVID jockeying for position. If guns were a prophylactic, you’d expect them to shoot cheeseburgers and their cruisers. But as Richard Pryor observed: “Cops don’t kill cars…”
A firearm is necessary literally anywhere that has predators, unless you want to have all your livestock killed.
Also necessary if a tweaker decides on a midnight visit, as the police are half an hour or more away.
Counterpoint: cities shouldn’t exist
There should be a commission that caps the local human population at sustainable levels
Huh…? Is this an actual thing you actually believe in?
The commission bit was a joke but yes I’m not fond of cities
On a global scale, population density is about 180 people per square mile of agricultural land.
Cities don’t change that: you need a swuare mile of cultivated land for every 180 people to sustain those urban populations.
We need more, smaller, more dispersed cities. Not these urban hellscapes.
Cities are a way better way of sustainably housing our population than suburban or rural sprawl. We get to be a lot more space efficient by living in multistory housing, having public transportation, etc.
There is some truth to that idea, but not nearly as much as you think. You need about a square mile of cultivated cropland for every 180 people, whether your population is spread out in small towns or concentrated in large cities.
There is no reason to cram humanity into the tightest package possible. We are using a square mile of cropland for every 180 people; it makes more sense to spread out, allowing us to get out of each other’s way.
Congestion kills efficiency gains.
Counterpoint: we don’t need to be that space efficient, and are better off in smaller communities
With the amount of people existing, yes we do. Otherwise there will be no nature left.
Cropland is not nature. For every 180 people in your city, add a square mile of cropland to its area before trying to determine the spatial efficiency of that city.
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I’m about as left as they come but weirdly enough I’m also a hunter, and I have to disagree, the guns I own are tools designed for specific purposes that aren’t killing humans. Hunting turkey, hunting deer, hunting duck, I even have a muzzleloader for that season, and a gun for back packing and hunting out of a saddle in a tree.
Hunting IMO is way more sustainable and ethical than buying store bought meat and it connects me with nature and let’s me first hand observe, appreciate, value, and want to protect ecology of my area.
How is hunting sustainable? It’s currently sustainable because a small number of people do it. I can’t see how it would be more sustainable than farmed, storebought meat.
From what I understand, it’s sustainable because hunters kill overpopulated species like deer. The deer become overpopulated due to lack of predators in the area and end up damaging the ecosystem by eating all the plants
Indeed. “Hunting is more sustainable than farming” is an idiotic assertion.
It might be if all the humans not hunting their meat starved to death - orwere never born. I think it really depends on what counterfactual you want to dream up.
You could argue that modern farming techniques created the agricultural surplus and enbled population growth and urbanisation and maybe helped the human population to grow to a level that hunter gatherers woud not be likely to have reached.
I think it is the scale of human population that is challenges sustainability of any tech, either method would be sustainable at some scale. I’m not convinced that modern farming practices are very sustainable for 10+bn people , for all that long. But I guess we’ll see.
Over the long term i think hunter gathering humans were around a lot longer than farmers have been, and a much much longer than modern intnsive monocultural/ pesticide / fertilizer based methods. So you’d have to wait a few thousand years to know how sustainable modern farming is.
Killing animals isn’t ethical. Inevitably the false dilemma gets painted between killing them or overpopulation, but the overpopulation is also a human-created problem, both through overdevelopment and killing off natural predators - the actual antidote is to scale back our development, or reintroduce predators, or simply let other natural stressors manage the population. Plant-based/vegan diet is far more ethical (nonsense about “plants feel pain”, “mice killed by plows”, “I can’t eat vegan because of my blood type” and other vegan bingo card BS aside).
This comment right here. Carnists are always arguing in bad faith.
Inevitably the false dilemma gets painted between killing them or overpopulation
it’s not a false dilemma. it’s a real dilemma. and your solution is also to kill them.
Taking just the “solution” of reintroducing predators - it’s still not the same. Predation specifically targets old, weak, sick members of a herd. What do hunters do? It’s what, a tag limit and age limit, and that’s it.
This whole conversation always seems so disingenuous. People doing hunting claim these altruistic motives, but have every adverse incentive that has nothing to do with those motives, from stocking their freezers to just bragging about what they hunted. Let’s be for real here, you’re not scientists or veterinarians carefully monitoring and managing a population, what you’re doing is taking the first justification you can find for what you already wanted to do.
it’s still not the same.
no, it’s not the same, but your solution is also to kill them. if that happens, and people can benefit above and beyond balancing the ecosystem, that’s even better.
Uh-huh. So of all the options - just shooting adult deer, or restoring the ecosystem to the way it was, or actual scientific approaches like sterilization, you’re only interested in the one that benefits you, and then you start ignoring the moral implications, and associated risks like humans getting shot. See, the conversation would go smoother if you just declare from the outset that you only care about what benefits you, and we could drop the pretense that this is about what’s actually the best solution.
the conversation would go smoother if you just declare from the outset that you only care about what benefits you, and we could drop the pretense that this is about what’s actually the best solution.
being snide is unnecessary. you can apologize.
you start ignoring the moral implications
you didn’t raise any moral implications. like what?
Hunting IMO is way more sustainable
Right whales would like a word.
sustainable and ethical than buying store bought meat
- it doesn’t scale
- it’s inconsistent
- zombie deer
Hunting […] [lets] me […] want to protect ecology of my area
Sorry, which part of killing animals fixes a landscape or its residents? What are you protecting by killing something? Does Fonzie need to give Ritchie another speech about Two Wrongs and a Right?
I am anti gun in almost every way, but I know where I live, deer populations get out of control. I’ve never hunted, nor do I have any desire to, but the fact is that if we didn’t cull the deer population periodically, they would breed themselves into starvation and cause who knows what kinds of damage to themselves and their ecosystem.
As unfortunate as it is, it’s a thing that has to be done for their own good and for the good of this area. I’m sure it’s like that in lots of places with lots of different species.
Agreed; and want to add it’s probably because people killed off the predators that kept the deer population in check.
Either that or they were brought to places where they didn’t have predators. Either way, it’s definitely our fault. We love fucking up natural habits.
WTF, whales have NOTHING to do with anything they said.
Derailing with strawman fallacy and red herrings undermines anything you say coming across as broken AI chatbot
You pushed the predators out of the area you live by living there. Not just your ancestors are guilty, you participate in disrupting the ecosystem by simply living. Without predators, prey animals overpopulate and destroy the ecosystem themselves.
Either give up your living space for the predators to balance out the ecosystem you live in, or do the balancing yourself. Don’t sit here being a self-righteous prat and bitch about people hunting when you’re fucking up the local habitat yourself.
Yes, I think mostly it was farmers who deforested the planet; and are still doing it.
They’re also used to kill animals, look up some nature docs where they snipe animals
That sounds like a terrible nature documentary
every nature documentary, is super boring, then cute animal suddenly dies, then weird looking animals have sex, then they snipe some the end
My wife and I are fond of listening to nature documentaries as we’re going to bed and there’s an incident in them that happens so frequently that “dead baby” has become a regular phrase at bedtime. Although sometimes it’s a fake-out and that has become sort of disappointing at this point.
I feel like every other one I was shown back in school had a scene like that, overpopulation of deer? (something like a deer) and boars can get insanely bad, they threaten all other species not just humans
Probably not the right animals idr it was a decade ago
Documentin’ Nature with Jeff Foxworthy
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you live in the US - well, I sure hope you do.
In the US I believe that guns are like pick-up trucks: far more people own them to plug gaps in their personality than the number of people who own them because they need their utility.
My personal view - and a generally held one - is that guns are a tool and to fetishise a tool is… weird; and suggests to me a troubled mind.
You’ve never shot one and you’re trying to rationalize it,eh? They’re simply a lot of fun to understand mechanically and to use. I have mine for home defense and fun, nothing more. No fetish, no mental problems, I hardly even think about them. They’re simply an impractical tool.
I use guns. I use a lot of other tools, too. My chainsaw doesn’t define my personality, so why would a gun?
See I think that’s where you’re getting lost. Most gun owners are not defined by their guns. They just own them and mind their own business. You’re seeing all gun owners as those military cosplaying scared little boys that put bullets all over their trucks with gun maker stickers to let the world know they really like guns. The vast majority of gun owners are not tools owning tools.
Uh, that’s essentially what my first comment is saying… that’s why I assumed the poster was from over in the US - the rest of the world ain’t really like that. The vast majority of gun owners across the world are normal people; who just happen to own guns, amongst other possessions.
I’m not familiar with the existence of chainsaw clubs where people meet up to show off their chainsaw collections, buy chainsaw accessories and merchandise, and swap fantastical stories about using their chainsaws to kill people who have wronged them.
I really like my electric leaf blower. It’s a lot of fun to just turn it on and watch all the leaves and dirt fly off the sidewalk so effortlessly. You just squeeze the trigger and it blows, you don’t need to pull a string or prime it or anything.
I enjoy it so much that the path to the front door is always clear, despite being under a tree that constantly drops leaves.
But leaf blowers don’t kill, and I don’t have vinyl stickers on my car bragging about my leaf blower. Or shirts stating it’s my legal right to own a leaf blower. It’s just a tool that I enjoy using.
The rise of battery leaf blowers gives me hope that humanity can be saved. I hope you have many happy years with it. It’s an incredibly satisfying pastime.
High five! I just build a gas chamber in my basement. It’s simply a lot of fun to understand mechanically and to sit in, valves not turned on of course. ;) I have mine for home defense and fun, nothing more. No fetish, no mental problems, I hardly even think about the gas chamber in my basement. It’s just nice to have.
I agree with op. Guns are used to intimidate, and for entertainment. Men and their fascination with power by holding a gun is toxic and a failure of society.
Yeah! Only men like guns! Fuck men! All hail the bears!
